The people behind the smash worldwide success miniseries “The Bible” now bring the story of Jesus’ life to audiences through compelling cinematic storytelling that is both powerful and inspirational. Told with the scope and scale of an action epic, the film features powerful performances, exotic locales, dazzling visual effects and a rich orchestral score from Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer. Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado portrays the role of Jesus as the film spans from his humble birth through his teachings, crucifixion and ultimate resurrection. We are proud to present the exclusive premiere of the new poster for the film.
AJ Michalka stars in “Grace Unplugged,” the story of a girl who wants more out of life than singing with her church’s worship band. When she has some success as a pop singer, she has to decide whether secular success is as meaningful as a life using her gift to praise God. I spoke to AJ, best known as half of the sister duos Aly & AJ and 78Violet about playing Grace.
What made you want to play Grace?
I was inspired by the film, wanting to be part of it as an actor. It’s a beautiful family film, an inspiring coming-of-age drama about this young girl who really wants to branch out and become an adult artist and get into the music industry, going on the road and creating her own music, her own identity. She ends up really finding herself. It’s a very sweet film. I wouldn’t have done this movie if she hadn’t learned a lot as a character. I love that about her. She’s really driven. She has the willpower to do it. Sometimes she goes about things in a weird way. She doesn’t always give her parents the respect they deserve. But she’s a young girl; we can all relate to that.
What do you want people to get from the movie?
I hope this movie opens up a lot of conversation, between fathers and daughters especially. I hope they talk about compromise. So many people think they need to sell themselves short or give up a part of themselves to succeed in this industry. Even if you’re not in the industry, people, especially young women, should know you don’t have to compromise your morals or who you are as a person to achieve some career goal.
How do your acting and singing careers give you different opportunities for creative expression?
They are so different and bring different pressures and different creative energies. There’s this instant gratification that is so special with music when you’re playing a show live or creating a song from the ground up. As an actor, there’s that rush when you go to the theater and see that something you are a part of has really come together. But they do go hand in hand and help each other. I’ve noticed I am a more comfortable artist when I am on stage because I’ve learned to deal with the pressures of being an actor. I feel more comfortable, whether it’s doing an interview or being part of a photo shoot. Musically, I’ve been trained that if something goes wrong on stage, you just kind of go with it. Both of them have similar pressures about performance. And doing both made me more confident and less nervous.
You and your sister got started very young.
I started performing professionally when I was about nine. When we were 12 and 14 we got signed for recording and musical performances. We knew what we wanted to do at an early age, whether it was professional or not. It wasn’t, “Maybe we’ll get signed or book a job,” but “We want to do this, we love entertaining, maybe just for pleasure or maybe as professionals.” We knew it was something special we wanted to do. So when it took off in a bigger way, it was just the icing on top. We always tried to be very professional on the set. I was around a lot of adults who were good examples. We never wanted to be those child actors who become adults right away, like some child performers who want to grow up very fast and start acting like those little robots, but we knew we had to take it seriously as a profession. We were getting paid, we were on a set, so we took it seriously as professionals. We still stayed children, which is nice, and that is partly because our parents are so normal. And I couldn’t really do it without my sister. We really have been grounding for each other. Especially as a musician. I don’t really see myself as a solo artist. But even when I’m acting, she’s my first phone call. She really helps me get through things.
What other things do you do to stay grounded?
So many people surround themselves with people who say yes to everything just to keep their job. I like to surround myself with people who are going to be honest with me. If I’m about to do something that is not going to enhance me as a person, or if I am about to make some tricky mistake, I want someone there who will say, “Look, AJ, this is not necessarily the best decision.” And my sister will be the first one to do that.
What do you do for fun?
My sister and I are both active, really athletic. We kick-box and it is fun to be outdoors. We take the dogs to the dog park and we ride horses. We love being outside. We love to go camping in Joshua Tree. I love being around nature; I got that from my mom. We also like to invite people over for game night or a movie.
Would you like to kick box in a movie?
I would love to do an action movie. I feel like my body would be ready to kick into gear for something like that!
What was the biggest challenge in playing Grace?
Really, making sure I wasn’t playing AJ. We’re both musicians, we’re like in a lot of ways. But when I’m on stage, I’m very comfortable. I have my sister with me. I know what I’m doing. My goal was to strip away the comfortability and play a girl who has no idea what she is getting into. I wanted to be true to someone not used to playing a live show. And I wanted to be sure to bring some nuances to the character. She’s a sweet, fresh-faced Southern girl, but I wanted to make it my own.
And what is your favorite advice?
Separate yourself from the industry as soon as you come offstage. Let it go, come down from that high, and get into who I am as a person. When I’m done, it’s time to settle down and relax and snuggle up with my dog, read a book, call a friend. That’s how you can sustain being normal.
Interview: Galley Molina of “I’m In Love With a Church Girl”
Posted on October 2, 2013 at 8:00 am
I’m in Love With a Church Girl is inspired by the true story of writer/director Galley Molina. It stars Ja Rule, Stephen Baldwin, T-Bone, and Michael Madsen, and will be in theaters on October 18. I enjoyed speaking to Galley about what inspired him to make this film.
You wrote this story while you were in prison, I understand?
I had started writing mostly as an escape so it was unintended. I would write so much, kind of like a release. When I was writing, I could feel the leather in your car and smell your food, your favorite food, so I just started writing these stories. And as I started writing and it started coming together, I realized I had a lot of friends who would read them inside. They’d be like “hey man, this is really cool, man” and it got to the point where a lot of the inmates were like, “Hey you gotta go read these stories, man, they’re cool.” When the Church Girl story was done I had some real good friends ‘cause I I was serving while serving time so to speak while I was in the chapel – and a lot of the guys would say, “I want to meet a church girl,” or “Is this really true?” So it just became one of those things where you got to minister, you got to share, you got to inspire, you got to release at the same time. So that’s kinda how it started. My intent was just to possibly publish some books when I got home, but it turned into obviously more than that – it turned into a movie and the rest as they say is history.
How do you bring your faith onto a movie set and keep everybody on the same message?
I believe that you can’t just talk about it; you got to be about it. We had a really blessed set I will say, most of the time, I hear stories now ‘cause I talk to a lot of producers and filmmakers now and there’re like, “Ah man I had this story and I had that story” and they were all these nightmares. If you watch the youtube videos, or if you go to the website and you watch some of the behind the scenes videos, you’ll see our first day on the set. And I opened up in prayer. And obviously, we can’t assume that everybody’s a Christian or that everyone believes in God or that there’s not any other type of faiths on the set. So I prefaced by saying, “Hey this is a faith based film, we’re honoring God, we’re going to pray to God, I don’t want to offend anybody but this is what it is.” And so, aside from that, it’s no different than your daily walk. I don’t want anybody to see me saying this and doing that or think I fear who’s watching me. Or who I don’t think is watching me. It’s the same way on set. The spirit was definitely present on the set because we didn’t really have any situations through the whole thing so I guess to answer your question; it’s just that we’re not any different on set than we are at church.
Even though this is a fictional story, some elements of it are based on your life right?
I had to be careful how I said those things, moving forward as my lawyer was telling me, “Hey, you can’t say this is based on your life but you can say loosely based.” There are a lot of similarities – a lot of the story is true – some of it’s not true. The things that I felt needed to be changed in the story — we just got our rating yesterday for the film and it’s a PG, not PG 13. I think we didn’t need to show certain things. There’s no cursing in this film. There’s no violence, not any heavy violence, no sex scenes – nothing like that. I didn’t need to tell a lot of those things or show a lot of those things, you could just kinda say things without having to say them. When you see these people on the screen, you’ll be like, ‘oh these are some very serious individuals’ or you assume that what they are doing is wrong. But yes, for the most part, this is based on my life and the love story part and the tainted past and going to church, so yeah I’d say it’s very loosely based on my life.
So how do you go about casting somebody who will essentially to play you?
Good question, you know it’s funny when we were casting this film, I went out to Hollywood actors, like real legitimate actors, went through the real agencies with real offers, we spent a lot of money on this film, we spent millions of dollars on this film. We didn’t go out like a lot of films, and even a lot of films in our genre with very limited resources and limited budgets and try to create something that we didn’t have the resources or budget to do. So when I went after real Hollywood talent, I shone the light I guess you can say, they didn’t take it seriously or when they saw the word “church” in the title they were not going to stereotype or type cast an actor into a church film. So that was hard. They didn’t even want to read the script. So we re-grouped and God – there’s a story in the Bible that says go to your cupboard and bring me your jars, and basically what it means is everything you need is inside your house right now. My relationships over the years have been embedded in the media industry and a lot of it was in music, so if you notice, a lot of the cast, they’re musicians, they’re rappers, they’re singers, T-bone, and Ja Rule and AJ and so it just ended up being that way. And then to try to find a pool of talent that can really act, there’s not this huge Christian pool of talent out there, or at least that are admint, “Yes I’m a Christian actor” or “I’m an actor and I’m Christian,” so I couldn’t put a Yankee hat on Kirk Cameron and say, “Hey man I need you to play Miles Montego,” that just isn’t gonna work. And they all did such an amazing job and we’re really excited to see peoples’ reaction when they see Ja Rule act in this film.
I have a theory that musicians in general can do very well in acting because you’re telling a story with a song. And also a lot of acting has to do with sense of rhythm and timing and I think that is something they understand.
You’re 100 percent right. I never really heard it put that way. I’ve always looked at it as for example, rappers, why do rappers get on the road? They are very passionate people. They are really passionate people and acting is passion. And like you say, they know how to memorize lines because they memorize songs and to hear it that way is great. It’s telling a story in a different way so that I totally agree with you.
What is it about movies and music that communicates so powerfully with people?
I think first of all, they are the biggest platforms in the world; television, film and music. It’s global; I mean it’s even bigger than a book. Obviously a full feature film – everybody goes to a movie or ends up seeing a movie on television, everybody can hear a record on the internet or their iPod or on the radio. I think that’s how we communicate these days – that’s how trends are set – that’s how news is relayed from one side of the world to the other, so at the end of the day, it comes down to it is the biggest platform in the world – is the media – and second of all, that’s why I think – and to answer your question- we have to be very responsible in how we use it. Now can you say… imagine if the apostles had jets or internet. How fast would the Word have spread?
Can you imagine that because –think about it- these guys with Jesus – Jesus only walked a certain portion of the earth – he didn’t walk the around the world, he didn’t walk on all the continents so if they had been able to get on a jet or send a text over to the next country – the Word would have spread that much faster. So, us as musicians as filmmakers, as producers and directors, labels, CEO’s – we need to make sure that when we’re using these platforms that we are being responsible. As Christians we need to make sure we’re Christ honoring and not pound people over the head with it. But just be responsible with it and try to entertain at the same time. And so I think everyone is always going to be drawn to the movies. Like Israel Houghton said, you may not be able to get someone to go to church with you, but you can definitely get them to go to the movies with you.
I think that’s it right there. And what are you going to do next?
We’re gearing up for the next two films – we’re gearing up for one that’s called the The Promise, and it’s based on a song Shout to the Lord by Darling Chet and next will be a couple of scripts which I co-wrote which has been really fun. We’re doing the story of Job – a modern day man but we’re calling it Boj- we’re spelling it backwards – which is really cool. That story wrote itself in today’s time. It wasn’t a hard reach for that script. But I will say that these next couple of films will be very epic. We’re bringing in the same director who did Church Girl, a lot of the same team. These movies are going to be very epic in the sense there’s nothing really urban about these films as it was on Church Girl. A-list actors. Faith-based films have never been done like what we’re planning. I believe we raised the bar with Church Girl, as far as production level. You can see just by the trailers the quality of this film. Not talking about the content, just the production of the film could be put up against any Universal Lionsgate film. We use the same cameras, the same crews, the same lighting and all that type of stuff same as Union films, WGA, SAG but these two films man are gonna be real epic, meaning proportion, twice the budget. And we can spend 10 million dollars like Hollywood spends 25 million, the same way we did Church Girl. It’s about being good stewards with it and so we’re excited. Those are the next two films, Israel and I are partners now, everything that we do – we merge our companies together. We did this last record together, the G Step 7 record which is an amazing record. I think it will be a staple in the church for a long time to come. We won a Grammy on that record this year. We’re gearing up for a couple of more records, we released that “Darling Chet” record, we’re doing Bible study curriculums. RGM stands for Reverence God and Media, which means that any form of media that we can put our hands, our thoughts and our hearts to – to spread the Gospel – that’s what we’re gonna do. So definitely in the next two films, we start pre-production real soon here – and the next couple of months will be the next couple of more records and one of the things that I think I’m really excited about to be honest, is a television show that we’re developing as a sitcom. It’s a faith based sitcom, it won’t feel so faith based, but it is from front to back. We’re in the mists of developing that now for network. So that’s going to be one of our fun baby projects ‘cause it’s coming together.
I really enjoyed talking to Will Bakke of Riot Studios about his new film, “Believe Me.” I’ll post information about the movie’s release when it is available.
Tell me a little bit about this project.
I’d love to. Well, “Believe Me” is the story of four college seniors who start a fake Christian charity in order to make the money that they need for tuition for college. In the process of throwing this big fundraiser to tell people that they’re donating wells in Africa, they end up being asked to be the keynote speakers for a summer-long evangelical tour. And so they kind of get little into their heads and they decide to sign on and do it and just sort of study the Christian culture in order to get away with it. I think people would sort of expect some big altar call at the end but this is a very different story and we’re excited to tell it.
Where did the story came from?
Michael Allen and I have actually produced two documentaries together before we wrote this. We were in college when we made “One Nation Under God.” He and I and two buddies of ours road-tripped around the United States just asking people what they believed about God. We were both from Dallas, Texas. We kind of grew up in the Bible belt and realized that our faith, we only had it because our parents had it and because that’s what we were kind of raised to have. And we just wanted to get out of that bubble and just find out what other people believe and really challenge our own beliefs in the meantime. And as a result of that, it kind of brought us to make a second documentary called “Beware of Christians.” Michael and I and our other buddy Alex Carroll who jumped on board with us created that film really as just a way of solidifying what we believe and how that would shape our lives and what we would lack, especially in college. I think both of those films really were kind of the jump-off point for “Believe Me.” We made these two films that were probably labelled as Christian films, because we’re Christians ourselves but it was about us. And so we were excited to take a look at the industry and kind of see the ins and outs of it and we just realized how many funny things there are about Christians out there and so the idea of “Believe Me” came out of this: what if somebody really wanted to take advantage of that? What would Christianity look like to an outsider? That was kind of a starting point for the film.
What were some of the challenges of going from documentary to feature film?
There were a lot of challenges. When we made the documentary, we had a couple of notes written down on like a napkin on what we wanted to do while we were Europe or while we were touring around the United States. There was no real planning to it beforehand. With a movie like this, we spent about two years writing the script and polishing it and just working out every character arc, every story arc, every theme to the movie and two years of writing transitioning into directing for me. And there’s a lot of people involved. It was no longer just me holding the camera running around filming as much as I could and just throwing a story together at the end. We had a very precise story that we wanted to tell and it was a lot of people involved so it was a completely different experience. It was so rewarding and humbling and I was very excited. We actually just wrapped yesterday at 6:00 AM so I’m still winding down from the experience as you can imagine. At some point you start to feel like everyone is playing with paint brushes when you’re directing because it’s such a collaborative effort. And I loved it for so many reasons because I didn’t have to be thinking about what writing was like or exactly what the camera shots were going to be because I’d worked that out beforehand with my director of photography so on the day that we’re shooting, my mind was just fully into the story and fully into the characters and I had just this incredible team behind it that was making everything look ten times more amazing than I could have ever imagine. So it ended up being a surprise, just being able to really focus on just one aspect of filmmaking which is the directing side and much less the technical aspects because those were already worked out in pre-production.
Do you consider this one a Christian film and who do you think is the audience for it?
With this film specifically, Christianity is the backdrop to the story but I would never label it that. We didn’t want it to be that. We weren’t shooting for that. We believe this story is all about the idea of truth which is an universal theme which we’re very excited about because it doesn’t matter really where you’re coming from on the line of faith whether you’re for it, against it, whether you have it, whether you’re a part of a religious culture or not. Anyone can walk into this movie and get it and really understand the desire that we’re going after. It’s all about the idea that truth is relative and that what works for you works for you and what works for me is best for me. We start to see that there are a lot of different characters that are really good people that live with that mentally; they kind of get in their own way. And when those different wants and needs clash, it’s compelling as a viewer to see that. And so it’s not a Christian film. We’re pretty excited to tell people that just because we don’t want to have any kind of pre-conceived notions in people’s minds coming into it . One of the tough things about being labelled that is a lot of times people believe there is going to be some sort of agenda to the story which we don’t have. We just really want to tell a compelling story. There’s no secret motive or agenda behind it. Although, we are guaranteeing a 100% conversion rate with this movie; I hope that’s not confusing at all. We promise there is going to be conversion. We’re not positive on what religion it’s going to be on by the end of the show but we’re promising a 100% conversion-rate.
What effect do you think it has on people to try to live up to other people’s expectations?
It’s not so much I think for these guys to live up to expectations as much as I think it is based on themselves as a whole. They just committed to becoming the speakers on this major evangelical tour and as a result, they had to sort of adapt and they ultimately don’t want to go to jail for what they’re doing. I think a lot of it has to do with beliefs and why do you believe what you believe. It is because someone stood up on the stage and told you that something was true or is it because you have investigated and researched and really looked into what someone says and is claiming and for me alone, with this movie it’s just so interesting because Alex Russell, we was the star of the movie “Chronicle” last year. He plays the lead in our movie and in the film it was so interesting to shoot with him because there’s just some amazing scenes where he is preaching up on stage and all the credit to him because he’s an incredible actor but he just sold it so well that it made the rest of us kind of look back and be like, it’s really freaking me out how well he can sell this. And I know personally that Alex Russell doesn’t identify himself as a Christian. I think he’d be comfortable telling anybody that, he actually has. But you know, it’s very interesting to see just the words come out of someone’s mouth that seem so compassionate and so compelling and yet at the same time, isn’t what they believe.
That’s why they call it acting.
Exactly. So it really made me rethink what my youth leaders taught me back in the day. Like, ah, I wonder if they were really genuine in all of this. That’s just what gets serious about it when it has to do with religion and faith and putting your chips on something that could change your entire life, not knowing if it’s coming from a genuine place or not.
When you were writing this script and you were working on, as you said, the structures and the characters and all that, what were some of the resources that you relied on? Did you look at other movies? Did you look at books about script writing? What did you do?
We read plenty of books on screenwriting. I was a film student at Baylor University and took screenwriting courses. It was a great education in terms of like what it looks like to tell a good story and I think for the two years that we were diving into script; story was the most important thing to us. And like I said earlier, without having an agenda, that’s what we wanted to make for ourselves in the first place is compelling characters, compelling stories, even tell the stories of characters that don’t line up in the same world-view as us. We love the idea of college students just getting in over their heads and how they react. It’s just such a pivotal time of life in the way that’s going to shape you later so we love playing in that sort of age range.
The people behind the smash worldwide success miniseries “The Bible” now bring the story of Jesus’ life to audiences through compelling cinematic storytelling that is both powerful and inspirational. Told with the scope and scale of an action epic, the film features powerful performances, exotic locales, dazzling visual effects and a rich orchestral score from Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer. Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado portrays the role of Jesus as the film spans from his humble birth through his teachings, crucifixion and ultimate resurrection. We are proud to present the exclusive premiere of the new poster for the film.
